queenhood

From queen +‎ -hood.

queenhood (usually uncountable, plural queenhoods)

1. The state, rank, or status of a queen.
   • 1972, Gwendolyn Brooks, “Report from Part One”, in Report from Part One, page 86:

     I—who have 'gone the gamut' from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new black sun—am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of the new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress.

2. Racially charged pedestalization of Black women, often as an extension of Afrocentric idealization, that is in fact damaging to gender equality; a particular type of "benevolent" sexism.
   • 1977, The Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement" (better known as the Combahee River Collective Statement), in Zillah R. Eisenstein, editor, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism‎^[1], published 1979:

     This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

3. (rare) An apex or pinnacle.
   • 2024, Tamsyn Muir, chapter 26, in The Locked Tomb Series: Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, Nona the Ninth:

     "[…] They say my House loves beauty—they did and they do—and there's a kind of beauty in dying beautifully … in wasting away … half-alive, half-dead, with the very queenhood of your power."

• Because of the term has, from the mid-1970s on, become associated with sexism and racial and gender stereotyping when applied to Black women other than in regards to an actual royal position, care must be taken in use to avoid unintended insensitivity or even bigotry.